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Apparently the NFL & its owners don’t realize how replaceable pro football is. Any Browns’ fans who followed the team prior to its move to Baltimore after the 1995 season remembers life without the NFL. Sure, there were games on TV, but they didn’t include any teams you really cared about, so after awhile you just stopped watching. Browns’ teams since haven’t been a whole lot of fun to watch either for the most part, but at least we have a team to follow.

The days when Sunday was about getting homework, business work, or chores around the house done don’t seem that long ago. The first few weeks you would remember that football was on, but be a little sad you didn’t have a team to cheer for that day. Incredibly, within a matter of weeks, new hobbies, ambitions, and interests sprang up.

And now, all those options are better. There are more sports, more TV stations, most everything offered in high definition too. We’ve got games to play on the Internet, and on our cell phones for that matter. There’s MMA, competitive eating, amazing online gaming, and movies in 3-D…all things that practically didn’t exist back when the Browns left in 1995.

Yeah, we're not too excited about the work stoppage either. Attention owners & players: The average fan does not like to watch millionaires bicker about how to get even more millions.

Want a more current example? It wasn’t that long ago the NHL had a big labor dispute, and the sport is still trying to recover. Their games used to be played on ESPN, now you have to hunt around to find them on Versus. ESPN replaced the NHL games with college & NBA basketball, & seemingly upped its reporting for the latter two while diminishing its NHL coverage. Hockey would love to be relevant, but people are so used to life without it on a major channel several nights a week that it’s hard to be a factor anymore.

So now NFL owners apparently want a “safer” league where players play more games. The more games you play, the more chances for a concussion. This does not sound like a plan to make the game safer.

We all know the owners want a bigger slice of the pie, b/c they’re taking all the financial risk. Nevermind the players are taking all the health risk. Adrian Peterson runs “all day” now, but in 15 years he may struggle to walk into a room. Worse, once he gets there, he might forget what he went in the room for in the first place.

Hopefully at some point the NFL administration, its owners & players will come to a new labor agreement & we’ll have a normal draft, training camp period, and regular season. If they don’t, they’ll likely be shocked at how quickly everybody just moves onto something else.

After all, some of us have better things to do than spend 3+ hours watching 4-5 minutes of live game action (when you add up the few seconds each play takes – the rest is mostly just talking heads & commercials).

I happen to be watching some great NBA basketball right now & enjoying it. NFL what??

Here’s a nice story on the NFL labor dispute from ESPN.com:

WASHINGTON — Had enough of the he-said, he-said rancor between the NFL and players? Don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

The outcome of the league’s first work stoppage since 1987 could be decided in court; the first hearing on the players’ request for an injunction to block the owners’ lockout was scheduled for April 6. In the meantime, there probably will be more of the same as Monday, when Kevin Mawae — president of the NFL Players Association, the now-dissolved union — accused the league of spreading “complete falsehoods and complete lies.

“I think it was all a show, with no real intent to get a deal done, other than just to say they made a proposal — that was no different than anything else that they proposed over the last couple years, couple months, couple weeks,” said Brees, a named plaintiff in the players’ antitrust lawsuit against the league.

Brees and Indianapolis Colts center Jeff Saturday, also a member of the players’ executive committee, complained that the players were not given enough time to assess and ask questions about the proposal owners made Friday morning.

“It just seems odd you would wait until Friday to put out a 20-point proposal, when each point has a number of different details in it,” Saturday said.

The NFL’s lead labor negotiator, Jeff Pash, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that Friday’s proposal contained various new provisions. He said owners offered a 10-year deal.

“I was frankly surprised that the [owners’ labor] committee supported an offer as forthcoming as that was,” Pash said.

He also said the league would have been willing to agree to a third extension to the collective bargaining agreement, which originally was due to expire at the end of March 3, before two delays. But another extension, he said, “wasn’t really discussed in a serious way, because it was perfectly obvious they weren’t interested.”

By the end of Friday, talks broke off, the union announced it no longer would represent players, Brees and others filed suit, and the owners imposed a lockout at midnight.

“If they were saying they were not going to negotiate, under any circumstance, after 4 p.m. on Friday, don’t you think you have to ask yourself: Who was it who was in Washington putting on a show?” Pash said.

“We answered all the questions they had at the time, and we never put a deadline on it. We’re not the ones who were filing a lawsuit at 5 o’clock,” Pash said.

For all the things the owners and players disagree on, the two main sticking points are clear: how much money owners would get up front before dividing the rest of $9 billion in annual revenues with players, and the union’s demand for full financial disclosure.

“If we’re going to talk about ‘trust,’ maybe you should ask the owners if they trust each other to see each others’ books,” Mawae said. “I think that’s a greater issue than the players trusting the owners.”

Under the old CBA, owners received more than $1 billion to cover certain operating expenses, before other money was split with players. When negotiations began on a new deal, the owners sought an additional $1 billion off the top. Both sides acknowledge there was movement in that area.

But as the NFLPA’s lead spokesman, George Atallah, put it Monday: “The perception is that we were really, really close. The reality is we really, really weren’t.”

Because the NFLPA says it no longer is a union, but rather a trade association — a distinction the NFL calls a “sham” — Atallah said any decision to return to negotiations would be up to the lawyers representing the players, rather than NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith. Asked whether there would be talks before the April 6 hearing, Atallah replied: “As of now, no.”

An NFLPA source seconded that notion to ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter on Monday afternoon. The source expects a ruling on the players’ injunction request within a week of the hearing.

“No chance whatsoever,” the source said when asked if a settlement was possible. “There is no union anymore so it is impossible for collective bargaining to occur and there will be no settlement or even the discussion of it before this injunction is ruled on.”

The league, meanwhile, would prefer to return to the negotiating table. Starting Feb. 18, the sides met 16 times at federal mediator’s office.

“We would get back together with them tomorrow if they wanted to. We’re not the ones who walked out. We’re not the ones who renounced our status. We’re not the ones who filed litigation,” Pash said. “So we would get back together with them tomorrow. And if they have questions about our proposal, we’d answer them. If they have alternatives they want us to consider, we’d consider them.”

Mawae said that if the NFL contends the union walked away from mediation, “that’s a fabrication and a lie. We sat in that room … Tuesday and Wednesday of last week for 16 hours. … We met face-to-face a total of 30 minutes.”